IN MEMORIAM

For T. M.

 

Now that you are gone, you suddenly loom large in our memory, its vast spaces emptying themselves of our puny, if laughable, concerns to give way to you. Ah, pain comes in varying degrees, but it is there, when we pause from our present worries and remember. Do we say, like Rilke, that we have our own dead, of whom we have let go, and they are so at home at being dead, so contended, and so cheerful? (But you didn’t even give us the chance to properly let go of you because you simply chose to go away unnoticed!)

And how could we speak of you as if you now belonged only to the past? Here, in the memory of the heart, you are so much promise still happening, untouchable to nature’s unpredictable claims. If we can only transform things from the real to the unreal, and speak only of mere reflections upon the dark surfaces of our gloomiest days, and not of the irrevocability of your absence, its somber shadows now lengthening, now engulfing us…
02/10/06

 

The state, human rights and the simultaneous realization of norms

Interlacements

The Guardian recently published an essay by the American legal scholar Eric Posner on the failure of human rights to live up to its utopic promise. Posner flails at the top-down approach the UN human rights system has propagated around the world, despite the ambiguities and contradictions that the complex of human rights laws are stricken with. He concludes his essay with a plea for a new approach, thus:

It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with…

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In Solidarity with #Charlie Hebdo

Interlacements

Excerpts from our Mideo Cruz blasphemy case pleadings:

Art calls for a democratic solidarity even in the face of an intense confrontation of values and perspectives because ultimately, if art is to exist in a society that promotes democratic principles, it must sometimes be allowed to express even those thoughts and ideas that may not sit well with what the majority believes to be within the limits of acceptability.

Solidarity expects that a majority sure of their convictions should be able to take it in the chin when their cherished beliefs are put to question by a counter-cultural dynamic; it expects that in the face of intense questioning the majority, since they are sure of their convictions and are secure in their cherished doctrines, will be able to hold up on their own and offer a counter-argument in a dialogical manner that shows both grace and civility.

Of course, this…

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2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.